Throughout history when societies enjoy above average improvement, it is because they are able to displace inheritance-based systems. These inheritance-based systems hand out benefits to random children, they subvert progress by enabling the incompetent and disabling the competent. Commonly, people who inherit stuff (money, authority, property) keep skewing laws to prevent others benefiting from the fruits of their labor, so that inheritors can maintain ownership. They do this by paying to skew laws to benefit owners over achievers.

If privacy doesn't exist anymore, then the inheritors will receive a level of power they have never had before. They will be unstoppable. We will reach an end-state of cultural-political development where the inheritors will no longer be challenged. We have had dark periods of time when inheritors have ruled for long periods, ancient Egypt with mass enslavement for example. Without privacy we will reach an event-horizon of wealth inequality, and no political counter-movement will be able to take root to challenge it. We are seeing the beginning of this in Hong Kong, we are seeing it in an uncompetitive pay-to-play patent system, in an increasingly monopolistic corporate environment, in increasingly uncompetitive marketplaces in dark pool trading systems, and in Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/Google/Amazon app stores and tech markets.

The threat to privacy is the greatest threat to progressive civilization we have ever encountered IMO.